A reader and writer fooling with words

The Eponym Series – Braille

This week’s word, and a new entry in the eponym series, is braille. The alphabet of raised dot characters used by those with severe visual impairment. I never saw a braille book until I spotted my classmate in university smoothly reading his textbooks this way. He’s now a professor, so clearly the braille books helped.

Braille alphabet

But what I didn’t know was that braille was only partly invented by Louis Braille.

In 1819 a French artillery officer, Captain Charles Barbier de la Sierra devised a code of embossed dots and dashes to be read at night and hence avoid enemy fire at any lit lanterns. It didn’t catch on.

Two years later Louise Braille, blind since a childhood accident and then at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, encountered Barbier’s system either via a newspaper report read to him or via a visit from Barbier himself.

Braille dedicated himself to steam-lining the system for use by the blind and three years later, when he was just 15 year old, he had completed the system. Later he would publish adaptations for musical notation and other uses but sadly his system wasn’t taught at the Institute, where he became a professor, during his lifetime. It was adopted two years after his death and is now used worldwide.

Barbier may have made the breakthrough, but Braille spent his whole life refining it and promoting its use. Perhaps they are co-inventors?